ZERO
a graphic memoir by Jan Egleson
illustrated by Kseniya Galper
Available from Vook in the iTunes App store as – zero: a graphic memoir
In this riveting story of self-discovery and emotional transformation, author Jan Egleson and illustrator Kseniya Galper have combined text, still images, and moving images to create an innovative art form that ushers in a new era in publishing for serious literature. ZERO is the powerful story of a father-son relationship, the inner world of an artist, and a family transformed by the devastation of war.
Like many men, Jan Egleson grew up with a father who was emotionally absent; he struggled to understand why they had “zero” relationship. Jan’s discovery of his artist father’s World War II journals changed all that. The journals revealed a life-long struggle with what we would now call PTSD after Kamikaze pilots flying “Zeros” attacked his aircraft carrier in the South Pacific.
On the iPad, Egleson and Galper are able to render a son’s discovery of his father’s hidden world in a way that would not have been possible in print alone. ZERO is an almost magical blend of writing, illustration, and film that combines Egleson’s own fascination with the painter Thomas Eakins, fragments of his father’s life as a muralist working with Orozco in Mexico during the 1930’s, and excerpts from his father’s journals. As we read one especially harrowing excerpt, we see archival footage of the Kamikazes attacking the U.S.S. Saratoga.
ZERO is a graphic memoir about a son’s struggle to understand a father he never really knew, and by creating a work of art, to heal and transform.
Jan Egleson on this New Art Form
"When I first came across the boxes of journals, pictures, and watercolors, and understood their meaning, my only thought was to make a movie. But I quickly found that the graphic material, the art, the frescos, the footage of the war, the home movies, all the seductive images stubbornly refused to fit neatly into the format of a film."
"I began to search for a way to tell the story, and a form that would contain it ....the photographs are the ones I found curling and jumbled together in the boxes. The fragments from the journal are indeed just that, fragments of my father’s journal. But perhaps most astounding of all is the footage from the stricken carrier After reading his journal, experiencing the attack in his words as he scrawled them down aboard the burning ship, I found, after months of searching, filed away in the National Archive, the actual footage of the actual attack, filmed on the USS Saratoga. I still watch it in wonder, believing and disbelieving all at the same moment, that it is all, yes ALL, true."
"I began to search for a way to tell the story, and a form that would contain it ....the photographs are the ones I found curling and jumbled together in the boxes. The fragments from the journal are indeed just that, fragments of my father’s journal. But perhaps most astounding of all is the footage from the stricken carrier After reading his journal, experiencing the attack in his words as he scrawled them down aboard the burning ship, I found, after months of searching, filed away in the National Archive, the actual footage of the actual attack, filmed on the USS Saratoga. I still watch it in wonder, believing and disbelieving all at the same moment, that it is all, yes ALL, true."
“So the question became, how could all this material, film and photos and artwork and journals be combined into something artful? What form could contain all that Kseniya and I could imagine? And then, in a moment of cultural serendipity, the digital revolution brought forth the iPad.”
Author and Illustrator
Jan Egleson is a writer and film director. He has worked in the world of Independent Film, Studio Features, and Television. His films have won numerous awards, including the Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival. In addition to directing more than a dozen films over the past two decades, he has served on the Artistic Board of American Playhouse, the dramatic series on PBS, was an Executive Producer for Drama at WGBH TV, and a co-founder of Lemon Sky Productions. Currently he teaches in the Film Department of Boston University, and continues to write and direct independent films.
Kseniya Galper is an award-winning designer and illustrator. She was born in Minsk, Belarus, and moved to the United States at seventeen. Fascinated by visual arts since childhood, she studied at The New England School of Art and Design and Suffolk University. She is particularly interested in how visual arts are affected by different cultures, and her work explores many forms of visual expression, from traditional oil painting, digital collage and illustration, to back-lit panel illustrations. Kseniya currently lives and works in the Boston area.
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